Plante & Moran
Financial Services company Plante & Moran has drastically reduced the development time and cost of their interactive marketing campaigns by empowering business users to create interactive electronic forms.
Plante & Moran is the 11th largest certified public accounting and business advisory firm in the USA. They provide clients with financial, human capital, operations, strategy, technology, and family wealth management services. Plante & Moran has a staff of more than 1,400 professionals in 18 offices throughout the US Mid West as well as in Shanghai, China.
As is the case in many organizations, Plante & Moran's website content is maintained by the predominately non-technical marketing department. Using Microsoft Content Management Server, the Marketing team is able to rapidly update site content to support the business needs and marketing initiatives of the various business units.
Business Need
Until recently, when the web team got a request for interactive, forms-based content, they would not be able to respond with the same speed. They would need to rely on developers from their own IT department or on external consultants. While the quality of the forms produced was never an issue, development time was. Delivering a fairly simple form could take several weeks. In 2005, business demands required a better, faster solution. Julie Boudro, Plante & Moran Webmaster explains:
Solution
"In the fall of 2005, Plante & Moran's Web Development team was approached to develop an interactive form on our external website that would help our State and Local Tax Team identify potential tax saving opportunities for clients and potential clients with businesses in multiple states. The turn around time for the SALT Saver form was less than 2 weeks because of an advertisement Plante & Moran placed in a magazine promoting the tool on our website. With AchieveForms we were able to turn the form around in a matter of a day versus the standard development time of 2-3 weeks."
"With AchieveForms, what used to take us weeks to do can now be done in a matter of minutes; it is a simple to use tool that produces excellent results."
-- Julie Boudro, Webmaster
Plante & Moran had been evaluating AchieveForms, an electronic forms solution provided by Business Web Software. When the Web Development team was faced with the requirements of the SALT Saver project, they quickly realized that AchieveForms was the right tool for the job. Boudro continues:
The Results
"The decision to purchase AchieveForms was a simple one. Not only were we confident that we would be able to build the SALT Saver form before the magazine hit the newsstands, we knew of several other instances where Achieve Forms would save us time and money. To date we have used AchieveForms for the development of 10 interactive forms ranging from a simple contact us form to a morerobust mini assessment."
AchieveForms offers a tight integration with Microsoft Content Management Server. Once a developer has created an AchieveForms template, business users can access the intuitive forms editor by simply creating a new page based on that template. After creating the form, the form page follows the same approval and publishing process as any other piece of content. The resulting web page contains an AchieveForms form tightly integrated into an MCMS page.
Julie Boudro describes the benefits of using AchieveForms: "What makes AchieveForms an outstanding tool is the ability to create forms quickly and easily right within our website with little involvement from our developers. With AchieveForms, what used to take us weeks to do can now be done in a matter of minutes, it is a simple to use tool that produces excellent results."
